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The American Prospect - articles by authorenThere's Something About Shafthttp://prospect.org/article/theres-something-about-shaft
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<p><font size="+2" color="darkred"><b> J</b></font>ust as you're getting ready to crack the latest beach paperback, <i>The New York Times</i> comes along with another idea about what makes for good summer reading. "How Race Is Lived in America" is what the newspaper called the month-long series that ran in June. "Race relations are being defined less by political action than by daily experience, in schools, in sports arenas, in pop culture and at worship, and especially in the workplace," the editors asserted. The opening piece, about a Pentecostal church's struggles with integration, was a marvel of evenhandedness and empathy. Yet a subsequent article, detailing the creative clashes that went on behind the scenes of <i>The Corner</i>, an HBO miniseries, felt as cramped and inconclusive as its highly paid, hamstrung protagonists. When it comes to race, the article despaired, Hollywood is still a house divided.&#13;</p>
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<p>We don't look to summer movies for big statements about race. Scored to the sound of car crashes and ray gun blasts, summer movies are usually as disposable as popcorn. Until recently, the ideal entertainments were known as "tent poles," for being capacious enough to embrace the widest possible audience. Trying to be all things to all people, black and white and Latino, these movies often turn out to be more provocative than their creators intend. Like reports from the front, they're tuned in to the cultural moods of the moment, the daily divides that the <i>Times</i> tried to capture in its series. Coherent arguments are beside the point. Instead, you find a grab bag of conflicting ideas, a pacifying political prize at the bottom of everyone's Cracker Jack box, no matter what the viewer's race or gender. How is race lived in America? Check out a multiplex in July. And listen to the crowd.&#13;</p>
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<p><font size="+2" color="darkred"><b> J</b></font>ohn Singleton's remake of <i>Shaft</i> can never have the cultural impact of Gordon Parks's 1971 original, which immortalized Richard Roundtree's suave private-eye hero and helped to usher in the film genre known as blaxploitation. The earlier movie's opening credits set the stage. With that unforgettable Isaac Hayes title song percolating in the background, Shaft saunters through Manhattan like he owns the place. This "black private dick" is comfortable in Harlem and Greenwich Village; he's earned the respect of small newsstand owners and big drug dealers, not to mention the cops who begrudgingly depend on him for access into worlds they only know from afar. Watching the original now, you're struck by how much roaming Shaft does. Not only is he handsome and sexy and turned out in leather; he's free, he's fluid, he moves. (He still can't get a cab, however.)&#13;</p>
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<p><i>Shaft </i>2000, by contrast, opens with a slick but murky montage that is very James Bond in its fetishization of clothing, guns, and women. The story is again set in New York, and Samuel L. Jackson does his best with lines like, "It's my duty to please that booty." But this Shaft--a nephew of Roundtree's original--doesn't own the city. He's a cop, for one thing, not a private eye. And despite Jackson's way with a wisecrack, he's a far less commanding presence than his earlier counterpart. Take away the complicated facial hair and the sleek Giorgio Armani clothes, and this John Shaft is another hemmed-in black man in a city teeming with hostility. Any sexual magnetism is left curiously off-screen. Racial clatter punctuates nearly every frame of the movie, and cops are hardly immune; Shaft bristles when he hears another cop call a black suspect "cornbread." "Nazis with badges," he announces, scare him as much as the offenders they're out to arrest.&#13;</p>
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The new <i>Shaft</i>'s shrewdly conceived plot turns on whether a black family can find justice after a hate crime. An unctuous white yuppie, Walter Wade, Jr. (Christian Bale), bashes in the head of a young black man hanging out with three white girls at a midtown bar. His powerful father bails him out, and he hightails it to Switzerland. Two years later, Shaft is waiting when Wade tries to sneak back into the country. Powerful connections allow Wade to make bail again. An enraged Shaft quits the police force, whipping his badge over the judge's head like a weapon in a kung-fu movie. "No lawyers, no politics, no rules, no regulations," he declares. Shaft will go it alone. If the 1971 private eye was a lone ranger, then his twenty-first-century counterpart has turned vigilante, like Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood.&#13;</p>
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As an action movie, the new <i>Shaft</i> improves on the leaden original in just about every way. As a cultural statement, the film is remarkably pessimistic. The fancy bar where the crime occurs seems to welcome an interracial group, save for its one lethal intruder. Singleton conspicuously places black lawn-jockey figures in several scenes around the bar, as if to say, "They'll take your money, but they won't ever welcome you in." By the end, the film's title character has racked up an impressive body count. Yet the most brutal scene shows Shaft administering tough love to a young black man in trouble. A waitress asks the detective to look after her son, who is beginning to fall in with street corner drug dealers. Shaft pistol-whips one arrogant dealer to a bloody pulp and warns the rest to steer clear of the boy. Other cops cruising the neighborhood look the other way. It's a complicated and disturbing moment; after all, these are the kids who embrace blaxploitation style made famous by the first <i>Shaft</i> and now endlessly recycled in rap music and videos. Today's Shaft, it seems, is forced to clean up the mess his uncle inadvertently created.&#13;</p>
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&#13;<br /><i>Entertainment Weekly</i> reports that the <i>Shaft</i> shoot was an exceptionally troubled one, rocked by feuds between Singleton and Jackson on one side, and the white producer Scott Rudin and primary screenwriter Richard Price on the other. The compromises are evident throughout the film. Yet Shaft, the movie hero, has always been a middleman, threading his way between black and white worlds. The difference now is that the center barely holds. It's no longer just a black and white world; the film's most vivid character, Peoples Hernandez (Jeffrey Wright), is a Dominican drug lord who hooks up with venal yuppie Wade to expand his drug trade downtown. Cops are utterly corrupt. If justice is served, Shaft concludes, the law will have little to do with it.&#13;</p>
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<p><font size="+2" color="darkred"><b> I</b></font>t's a long way from Shaft in Manhattan to Jim Carrey, with a split personality, in Rhode Island. But Peter and Bobby Farrelly, film makers who have yet to find a taboo they won't exploit, venture into sensitive racial territory in their comedy <i>Me, Myself &amp; Irene</i>. Though <i>Dumb &amp; Dumber</i> and <i>There's Something About Mary</i> have made heaps of money, the Farrelly brothers remain crummy film makers. Both <i>Mary</i> and <i>Irene</i> are visually undistinguished and terribly overlong. But audiences aren't flocking to their films for the witty byplay and sophisticated <i>mise-en-scène</i>. It's the rude bits that make the Farrelly style a brand name and lead other film makers (think <i>American Pie</i>) to up the ante in outrageousness.&#13;</p>
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<p>By this standard, <i>Me, Myself &amp; Irene</i> will leave audiences chattering about Carrey's antics. See birds crap in Jim's open mouth. Gasp as he suckles at a woman's breast, a milk stain covering his upper lip when he's through. The adolescent fascination with bodily functions, the bad-boy willingness to mock the unmockable, like the disabled, has become a Farrelly brothers hallmark. <i>Irene</i> adds race to the mix. It's the most provocative element in an otherwise slack and puerile film.&#13;</p>
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Carrey plays Charlie, a Rhode Island state trooper who lives in a cozy waterside cottage. With his good manners and H.R. Haldeman buzz cut, Carrey is the white guy that time forgot, a 1950s fella out of touch with today. Here and in <i>The Truman Show</i>, directors have revealed in Carrey a spacey innocence and blissful disengagement that make him ripe for humiliation. <i>Irene</i>'s prologue shows Charlie deeply in love. Marriage follows. Then enters a snake in the carefully mowed grass: Charlie's wife falls for a black limousine driver--a dwarf, to boot. She gives birth to black triplets. But the ever-optimistic Charlie looks the other way, even when his fellow troopers question the children's parentage, and his wife leaves with her new beau.&#13;</p>
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Flash forward 15 years, and Charlie's boys are all grown up. They love their dad, even though, culturally, father and sons are a little far apart. He marvels at Jim Nabors; they talk trash and watch Richard Pryor videos. Like rap stars in action movies (Busta Rhymes shows up in <i>Shaft</i>), these three stooges have more street credibility than anyone else in the neighborhood. Lee Harvey (Mongo Brownlee) is as muscled and tattooed as Naughty by Nature's Treach; Jamaal (Anthony Anderson) and Shonte, Jr. (Jerod Mixon), are roly-poly clowns, like the late and unlamented Fat Boys. Charlie's not the smartest trooper around, but his sons are geniuses, breezing through their physics homework and dissing each other for missing easy questions on the SAT.&#13;</p>
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Inside this big happy family, Charlie is holding something in, and finally he cracks into a second personality, the volatile and abrasive Hank. Doctors diagnose him as an "advanced delusional schizophrenic with involuntary narcissistic rage." A shrink tells Charlie that he only hears what he wants to hear. Hank, his alter ego, is all id; he's the law-and-order man who truly deserves his buzz cut. Charlie tiptoes around confrontation, playing nice. But not Hank; he kicks ass.&#13;</p>
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Me, Myself &amp; Irene is played for sophomoric laughs, as Charlie and Hank battle for control of one body and vie for the affections of Renée Zellweger's title character. The film makers flirt with, but never explore, even in comic terms, the implication that Hank himself is a product of white rage, the aggressive flip side to the meeker-than-thou Charlie. Whether making lewd passes at Irene or offending anyone within earshot, Hank croons like a late-night radio deejay, a lizard looking for a lounge. Had the film really wanted to make waves, Hank would be black: a pent-up expression of everything his well-mannered white half can't or won't express. Instead, <i>Me, Myself &amp; Irene</i> flanks Charlie and Hank with more outsized, racialized personalities. The black triplets get the sassiest lines, and an albino named Whitey emerges as Charlie's sidekick and Hank's whipping boy. Everyone laughs at the dildo jokes, and the film ends in a mood of reconciliation that couldn't be further from the dourness of <i>Shaft</i>.&#13;</p>
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<p><font size="+2" color="darkred"><b> A</b></font> black director paints a bitter urban portrait in the guise of an action movie. Two white directors let a few angry seams show in an otherwise innocuous crazy quilt. Interesting, but by the end of the summer, who'll remember? In the logic of Hollywood, it's all about results, not reflection. Given time, good ratings, and great reviews, even the creators of the HBO miniseries described in the <i>Times</i> had to admit the infighting was worth it. As long as <i>Shaft</i> and <i>Me, Myself &amp; Irene</i> make money--and surely they will--offscreen disputes are forgotten. And the thorny, divisive issues raised in otherwise generic stories quickly disappear when a film attains box office success. The producers of <i>Irene</i> already say they'll spin off Charlie's triplets into their own movie. Samuel Jackson and Busta Rhymes drive off together at the end of <i>Shaft</i>, ready for their sequel. Brace yourself. And pass the popcorn. ¤&#13;<br />
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</center></div></div></div>Mon, 10 Dec 2001 22:44:56 +0000141669 at http://prospect.orgScott HellerPlaying Soldierhttp://prospect.org/article/playing-soldier
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<p>Young Hollywood actors like to boast of the hellish basic training they go through to star in war movies like <i>Saving Private Ryan</i> or <i>U-571</i>. Their stories are always similar. The message is always the same: Playing soldier will make a man of you.</p>
<p></p><p>The extraordinary French director Claire Denis hired a choreographer, not a retired Marine, to get the cast ready for <i>Beau Travail</i>, her eighth feature film. As enlistees in today's French Foreign Legion, the film's strapping corps of young men--scarred, shaved, and shirtless--are built for action. Yet in these postcolonial times, there's not much action to be found on the African coast of Djibouti, where the story is set. The camera pans across the legionnaires as they carefully iron perfect creases into their dress whites. Their training exercises begin as calisthenics, morph into martial arts, and become a vigorous form of modern dance. Meanwhile, a hulking tank sits nearby, empty and forlorn.</p>
<p>The director's sensuous style and cinematographer Agnès Godard's ravishing images are reason enough to see <i>Beau Travail</i>, which is showing up in art houses after playing the film festival circuit. This is a director at the absolute top of her game, a painter of moods whose canvas is primal and intimate, mysterious yet always compassionate. Unspooling on their own time and logic, her films demand engagement, without relying on arid tics left over from the avant-garde. At their best, as with <i>Beau Travail</i> and <i>Nenette and Boni</i> (1996), they can leave you weak at the knees.</p>
<p>The camera again leads in <i>Beau Travail</i>, but the luscious visuals rest on a powerful frame: <i>Billy Budd</i>, Herman Melville's tale of innocence destroyed. Set just after the French Revolution and filled with anxiety over the changing social order that threatened to follow, Melville's novella already had a subtle French accent. Denis and co-screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau move the story to present-day Africa, where France's oncemagisterial empire has become exhausted. The military's golden rule--"Forms are everything"--is even more resonant in this scorched landscape, which houses but never welcomes these protectors from elsewhere.</p>
<p>Keeping the legionnaires in line is Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant), who stands in for Melville's embittered master of arms, Claggart. While <i>Billy Budd</i> is narrated from a distance, soberly considering each character and his fate, <i>Beau Travail</i> climbs inside Galoup's head and never leaves. The film unfolds like a painful memory, told by the sergeant after he has left the legion and is counting out meaningless days in a spare Marseilles garret. "Maybe freedom begins with remorse," he notes in his diary, and the subsequent tale, fluidly moving between Djibouti and Marseilles, is, in a sense, a suicide note--for one misguided soldier, certainly, but also for the militarized masculine ideal that, he realizes too late, has let him down.</p>
<p>"Upon any abrupt unforeseen encounter," Melville memorably writes of Claggart, "a red light would flash forth from his eye like a spark from an anvil in a dusk smithy." Squat and pock-marked, with a thudding brow, Denis Lavant has just this scary intensity, especially as he puts his men through their paces. Alone in front of a mirror, where we find him again and again, Galoup is a very different specimen of man: vain, unsure, yearning. The "subterranean fire" that consumes Claggart is, in Galoup, not envy but a hole in the soul. He despises himself far more than anyone else can. The director's delicate treatment and Lavant's beautifully shaded performance create remarkable sympathy for the character. In forging a corps out of a motley assortment of individuals, Galoup demands discipline and obedience. But he doesn't possess the masculine grace that allows them to sail through their training. In every ropy muscle of his neck and shoulders, you can feel the strain of self-improvement, the making of the perfect legionnaire. All in the service of a bitter irony: As their superior officer, Galoup can no longer share in the easy camaraderie. He is twice removed, from the men he leads and from the nation he once called home.</p>
<p>Sentain, a new enlistee, makes it all look easy. Grégoire Colin, the young co-star of <i>Olivier, Olivier</i> and <i>The Dreamlife of Angels</i>, is an ideal Billy Budd. Perfectly ordinary in some shots, his sharply planed face assumes an aristocratic hauteur in others, separating him, if only slightly, from the other men. In an echo of the novella, Galoup first takes note of Sentain during a night away from duty. Wandering the streets alone at dawn, he stumbles across the legionnaires carrying the young man on their shoulders, heading back after a drunken night on the town. Galoup's obsession grows when his own beloved commander, Forestier (Michel Subor), singles out Sentain for heroically saving a soldier injured in a helicopter crash. The paunchy, sad-eyed commander, prone to gazing aimlessly at the sea, is among Galoup's only human connections. The thought that Sentain will usurp his favored place is too much to bear. Denis subtly ratchets up the tension as the sergeant's discipline grows harsher, and his charges' tolerance begins to fray. In a rare moment of rebelliousness, Sentain stands up for another legionnaire, who has been subjected to a brutal regime of hard labor. Galoup pounces, sending his rival on a forced march that should guarantee his elimination.</p>
<p>That's the plot, but only half the story. Like a choreo-grapher herself, Denis assembles the narrative in loose ribbons that tighten, with time, into recognizable form. Her adroit use of music guides the way. Many of the intense training scenes in <i>Beau Travail</i> are set to Benjamin Britten's oper-atic <i>Billy Budd</i>, but you don't need to know that to be stirred by the juxtaposition of soaring voices and straining bodies. A legion march through the desert, orchestrated by Galoup to keep Sentain far from the commander, is accompanied by Neil Young singing "Safeway Cart." Culturally, nationally, histor-ically, the music makes no sense. But the quietly sung lyric perfectly sums up the aimlessness of the entire enterprise.</p>
<p>Much of the director's reputation rests on her personal history, a child raised in Africa, the daughter of French civil servants. Her 1989 debut, the semi-autobiographical <i>Chocolat</i>, conjured racial and sexual tensions in 1950s colonial Africa. A worldwide success, it has largely shaped the director's reception since. Recent films, like <i>I Can't Sleep</i> (1993) and <i>Nenette and Boni</i>, are immersed in the worlds of the marginal, portraying immigrants and ethnic minorities, not the chic Parisians who sashay through much French fare. But a woman's steady gaze at soldiers in <i>Beau Travail</i> reminds us how interested Denis has been all along in the troubled nature of masculinity. Based on a true story, <i>I Can't Sleep</i> finds compassion for Camille (Richard Courcet), a black gay transvestite who murders elderly women. Featuring some of Denis's most nakedly emotional sequences, <i>Nenette and Boni</i> focuses on horny, lovelorn teenagers on the cusp of adulthood. The callow and hotheaded Boni learns what it means to be a man when his 15-year-old sister returns home pregnant. Conflicting emotions overwhelm him when he first studies the film of her ultrasound. He slaps her for saying she wants to give up the baby. Then his own tears come, and he's frozen in place. The film ends with Boni tenderly cradling the newborn child.</p>
<p>Beau Travail takes Denis back to the farthest fringes of French society. She became fascinated by the Foreign Legion, she told <i>The New York Times</i>, during a Bastille Day parade in Paris. "They were very solemn and proud," she said, "and they never mixed with the other soldiers." Placing the military corps in a remote outpost magnifies this sense of isolation. Here, every Frenchman is an outsider, warily eyed by the African men and women who can't fathom their rituals. Even within the unit, racial and ethnic differences are never fully submerged. The film keeps one eye on the three Muslim legionnaires who, observing Ramadan, sit outside the circle as the others eat. And it's no accident that Galoup engineers his revenge against Sentain by first punishing a black soldier, counting on the new recruit to come to the soldier's aid.</p>
<p>Men and nations, the film suggests, continue to place their faith in codes that have lost their usefulness. Indeed, both masculinity and empire depend on estrangement, men from themselves and empires from the people they seek to dominate. In a French twist on gender politics, <i>Beau Travail</i> breathes life into Susan Faludi's argument in <i>Stiffed</i> about "the betrayal of the American man." The closed male world of the legionnaires grinds out a corps that is disciplined and selfless, but for what purpose? It builds a team, but there is no opponent. Beneath the uniforms, the musculature, the rituals, the camaraderie is, well, what exactly? Emotions that go unexpressed. Doubt. Need. Broken promises. "The male paradigm of confrontation has, in fact, proved worthless to men," Faludi writes.</p>
<p>Innocence is doomed in <i>Billy Budd</i>, but Sentain gets a second chance in this adaptation. Rescued from a sure death, his fate rests with the native Africans, who squire him back to safety. His final words are an ambiguous epitaph for a man given new life: "Lost, lost." In Marseilles, Galoup meticulously makes his bed. Memory cleared, remorse expressed, he lies down, his revolver resting on his stomach. The camera closes in on the tattoo above his heart: "Serve the good cause," it reads, "and die." ¤</p>
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<hr size="1" /></center></div></div></div>Fri, 16 Nov 2001 21:39:44 +0000140715 at http://prospect.orgScott HellerLong Island Dreamin'http://prospect.org/article/long-island-dreamin
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<font size="+2" color="darkred"><b> E</b></font>very weekend of my childhood, it seemed, my parents would pack my sisters and me into the family Montego, and we'd head to Long Island, looking for houses. We children didn't dread the routine, the highway drive from Brooklyn and the perpetually deferred decisions. Instead, we reveled in the fantasy. First we chose which room would be ours; there would be no sharing here. Then we would sweat the details--the relative merits of a cathedral ceiling versus a sunken living room, the pivotal differences between a split-level and a splanch. </p>
<p></p><p>We never moved. And as time went on, I was glad that Long Island remained always just out of reach. Being from Brooklyn came with its own set of associations, but nothing could be worse than coming from <i>there</i>. Sitcoms and stand-up comedians underlined the message in number two pen-cil: Everybody knows this is nowhere. And many of the most acclaimed films of recent years have kept up the assault. The results were intermittently trenchant, in the case of Sam Mendes's <i>American Beauty</i>, or bitterly hilarious, in the hands of director Todd Solondz (<i>Welcome to the Dollhouse</i>, <i>Happiness</i>). Yet no matter who was behind the camera, there seemed to be only one way to treat suburbia: with scorn.</p>
<p> "I always wanted to make a documentary about this town," aspiring film maker David Gold announces in Eric Mendelsohn's brave and beautiful <i>Judy Berlin</i>. "About the paperboys, and about the PTA ladies. But nothing sarcastic. Nothing sarcastic. About how in winter you can see people eat their dinner behind those windows that get all golden-colored, about how beautiful it was. And it would have everything in it--everything."</p>
<p>He's crossing a field in the middle of Babylon, Long Island. Back home at 30, so bitter he hasn't even begun to lick the wounds of creative disappointment, he's been stewing in his parents' house, immobilized. Yet on the single magical day that makes up this magical film, he ventures again into the world that produced him. He should be ashamed to be from Long Island. He should turn the experience into the acrid raw material of comedy. Instead, he confesses this private dream to the film's indefatigable title character (played by Edie Falco), an aspiring actress herself, a bottle blonde with adult braces who is on her way to California to pursue the kind of career that has knocked David for a loop.</p>
<p>Built like a fishing pole with glasses, David (Aaron Harnick) would be an easy target in a Todd Solondz world; he might even be the brother of Dawn Wiener in <i>Dollhouse</i>, the nerd who gamely plays clarinet in a dreadful garage band called the Quadratics. In <i>Judy Berlin</i>, he's clearly a stand-in for the writer-director, who is making his feature debut. (The film won Mendelsohn best-director prize at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival.) Mendelsohn hasn't made a documentary, but he has lovingly detailed the small pleasures and peculiar comforts of the suburbia that produced him. Shot in otherworldly black and white, brilliantly scored to harpsichord music, Babylon in <i>Judy Berlin</i> is a land of surprises. Mendelsohn never utilizes the typical bird's-eye camera angle that looks down on a suburban neighborhood and renders its homes and its lawns indistinguishable. His camera continually looks up in wonderment--at the buzzing street lamp, the swaying willow tree, the perfectly drawn penmanship lesson stapled to the classroom wall.</p>
<p>Two momentous events set the film in motion. There's a solar eclipse, during which many of the film's characters are jiggled off their life course. And no less importantly, it's the beginning of the school year, a date that can still tingle with excitement for even the most jaded school-system vet. A schoolteacher's son, the director is deeply respectful of teachers for their fortitude, their struggles to keep their own emotions in check and to put their children's needs first. It's no easy feat for Sue Berlin (Barbara Barrie), a no-nonsense divorcée who yearns for the married school principal, Arthur Gold (Bob Dishy). The comforting rituals and rhythms of the school year keep Sue Berlin sane. When the bell rings and the students file in, she's fine. But the eclipse unsettles her. It also exposes a neediness in Arthur that isn't being fulfilled in his marriage to Alice, played with dotty dignity by Madeline Kahn in her final role. Alice could be the mad housewife you've seen a million times before. Painfully alone, she pads through her empty house aching for connection, whether with her husband, her uncommunicative son, or the cleaning lady Carol (Novella Nelson), who stays blissfully disengaged by the hum of the vacuum cleaner.</p>
<p>Freed up by the eclipse (and what a long eclipse it is; Mendelsohn's surreal whimsy tests a viewer's patience), Alice wanders through her subdivision with fresh eyes. Meanwhile, her angry son David is tagging along with Sue's daughter Judy, alternately horrified by her misguided passion and wowed by her chutzpah. Since <i>Judy Berlin</i> first traveled the film festival circuit, Edie Falco has gone on to win acclaim and an Emmy for her television role as Carmela in <i>The Sopranos</i>. This can only help the film get seen, and that's all for the best. Yet of all the performers, Falco comes closest to smudging the line between sympathy and parody.</p>
<p>Los Angeles beckons to Judy, but in the meantime, what's an aspiring actress to do on Long Island? Bit parts in local commercials and a gig at History Village, a historical recreation based on Old Bethpage, an aging Long Island tourist attraction that Mendelsohn enjoyed as a kid. Dressed in Colonial garb, Judy mimes her wifely duties as a fellow recreator solemnly narrates ("First there was the milking of the cows"). The director's ear for the ridiculous captures the tone of mock importance ("The--work--was--back-breaking"). But there's more to History Village than easy laughs. The film acknowledges how many of us, especially those born and bred in the suburbs, long for roots. Yet a silly Colonial village doesn't give suburbia history and, therefore, stature. Time has done what fakery can't. Babylon is old enough to have seen several generations of children romp through its schools and playgrounds. It's no longer shiny and new, no longer holding out the promise of the perennial present. Life and sadness have left their mark. </p>
<p>Since we know that the director himself did get away, it's nearly miraculous that he retains so much sympathy for the teachers and custodians and school secretaries who haven't. In cinematic suburbia, the fathers have lives away from the shag carpeting and overdone decor. They gather by the railroad (as in <i>The Ice Storm</i>) and shuttle off to another world. At heart, then, to laugh at suburbia is to laugh at the women who stay home. And so it is in such recent dissections as <i>American Beauty</i> or <i>Happiness</i>. Nothing is more cruel in Mendes's acclaimed film than watching real estate agent Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening) break down after furiously cleaning a house she wants to sell. And think about how much more sympathetically Solondz treats Philip Seymour Hoffman's heavy-breathing phone pervert, or Dylan Baker's pedophile Dad, than the lovelorn Camryn Manheim in <i>Happiness</i>.</p>
<p>The women at the heart of <i>Judy Berlin</i>--the title character, her mother, and Alice Gold--are aging, hungry, flawed, lonely, and self-deluded. But they are never grotesque. When they're acting foolish, they're being brave. Alice wanders; Sue finds the courage to give Arthur a kiss; and Judy, talentless Judy, does more than talk. She heads to Los Angeles to get famous.</p>
<p> I don't mean to portray Mendelsohn as starry-eyed about the world he has conjured. Melancholy visits the characters in <i>Judy Berlin</i> with the regularity of the daily mail. People in the neighborhood aren't looking out for each other the way they once did. A former schoolteacher who now has Alzheimer's walks the streets alone. Alice has slipped far enough into her own world that she hasn't even been over to see her good friend's kitchen renovations. And while the white housewives are kind enough to ask about the health of their black housekeeper's daughter, you know that kindly concern is as far as it goes. The needy Alice pleads with Carol to continue their "spacewalk" through the eclipse-shadowed neighborhood, but Carol has to head home, to her own neighborhood and her own problems.</p>
<p>Beneath the gleam of new appliances and fresh paint, suburbia's promises have always been contradictory. Community and privacy. Safety and isolation. The newly minted members of the middle class who flocked to Long Island fled cramped worlds that weren't of their own making, only to make neighborhoods even more homogeneous than those they left behind. Built to disappoint, the suburbs are more poignant than ridiculous, ripe for the sort of humane comedy so rarely seen on screen today. </p>
<p>I hope that Mendelsohn's effort gives heart to other film makers--and writers and artists--willing to make peace with their suburban roots instead of spitting on the doorstep of the family ranch. The wunderkind director Paul Thomas Anderson has described his own opus, <i>Magnolia</i>, as a stubborn love letter to his scorned childhood home, L.A.'s San Fernando Valley. And like Mendelsohn, he relies on a bizarre act of nature--a stunning rain of frogs--to set right the lives of the lonely, the pained, and the dying who cross paths there. <i>Judy Berlin</i> isn't quite so biblical, and in its small, quiet way, is all the more powerful. So is Tom Gilroy's <i>Spring Forward</i>, another indie with a suburban setting that has played the festival circuit but, ominously, hasn't yet made it to the multiplex. Here a pair of ornery parks-department workers, brilliantly played by Ned Beatty and Liev Schreiber, learn to communicate, to teach, and to heal during four seasons of not-so-hard labor. It doesn't sound like much on paper, which may be why this big-hearted film is still awaiting a commercial release. Like <i>Judy Berlin</i>, <i>Spring Forward</i> sacrifices comic swipes for human connection. The film is set in New England, not New York, but the sentiment is the same. Profound moments can happen in the town square or at the mini-mall. You can think you come from nowhere and still go home again. ¤</p>
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<hr size="1" /></center></div></div></div>Fri, 09 Nov 2001 22:49:50 +0000140597 at http://prospect.orgScott HellerWhat Old Women Rememberhttp://prospect.org/article/what-old-women-remember
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<p><font color="darkred" size="+2">T</font>he forbidden love affair between Lilly Wust and Felice Schragenheim was made for the movies. The setting: World War II Berlin. Lilly, the wife of a German army officer and the mother of four children, met Felice, an aspiring journalist and a Jew. While bombs rained down on Berlin and Lilly's husband was away at the front, the women set up house. At first, Wust, a Nazi sympathizer, didn't know that her lover was Jewish. When she found out, she helped Schragenheim keep up her pretense and shielded several other Jewish women as well. The efforts were for naught; Felice was eventually deported to Theresienstadt and likely died during a forced death march. After the war, Lilly waited in vain for her return.</p>
<p></p><p>Almost 50 years after her lover was declared dead, Wust revealed the story of their affair and shared their voluminous correspondence with Erica Fischer, a German writer. Her 1994 book <i>Aimée &amp; Jaguar</i> was an immediate best-seller in Germany and has since been translated into 11 languages and two movies: first in <i>Love Story,</i> a 1997 BBC documentary as direct and unfussy as its title, and now in the sumptuous German drama <i>Aimée &amp; Jaguar. </i>The winner of acting awards at last year's Berlin Film Festival and a favorite at gay and lesbian festivals stateside, <i>Aimée</i> makes its way to theaters this month.</p>
<p>What could be more compelling than the true story of illicit lovers separated by genocide? Well, fiction, as it turns out. Or at least fiction in the sure hands of a sensitive French director wise beyond his years. His name is Emmanuel Finkiel, and his first feature, <i>Voyages, </i>is slowly touring festivals, universities, and art houses. It deserves at least as wide a viewership as <i>Aimée &amp; Jaguar </i>but may have a harder time without the built-in gay and lesbian audience. That would be a shame. Like the best Iranian cinema, or the work of Finkiel's mentor Krysztof Kieslowski, <i>Voyages</i> is meditative, humane, and heartbreaking. It takes seriously the irrevocable ruptures caused by the Holocaust, the brutal confusions wrought by diaspora. Yet it allows the audience a measure of hope that its own characters can't fully recognize.</p>
<p>Though their styles are dramatically different, both films are culled from the hazy, incomplete memories of old women. Their subject is "the afterlife of memory," a term put forward by University of Massachusetts professor James E. Young, among the most astute current commentators on Holocaust art produced by the postwar generation. Though he writes mostly about visual artists and architects, Young (along with others) has pinpointed the ethical dilemma of the contemporary artist, trying to respectfully depict history that was not experienced firsthand. Commercial cinema, with its limited tolerance for ambiguity, has an especially hard time with this. Hollywood will throw enormous resources into formulaic movies that celebrate "the human spirit" or recreate, with horrifying immediacy, life inside the camps. Presenting memory in fragments, conveying what Young calls "the void left behind," has proven far more difficult. <i>Aimée &amp; Jaguar</i> and <i>Voyages</i> handle the challenge with differing degrees of success.</p>
<p></p><p><font color="darkred" size="+2">D</font>espite the unconventional romance at its center, <i>Aimée &amp; Jaguar </i>is for the most part a very conventional movie. Solidly made by Max Färberböck, a first-time director, the drama captures the heady, terrifying experience of life--and love--in a city under siege. Air-raid sirens interrupt dressy evenings at the symphony. The hulk of a hotel sits at the edge of a street in rubble. Inside, the upper crust engages in flirtatious cocktail chatter. Outside, injured bodies are carted away for first aid, and refugee families cluster in burnt-out vehicles.</p>
<p></p><p>"We live in exciting times," Felice announces, with characteristic gallows humor. Like Katharine Hepburn at her 1930s best, Maria Schrader is all angles and audacity as the risk-taking Jewish seductress. Planted in the heart of the hatred, Felice does more than stay alive; she thrives, smuggling documents and information from the offices of the Nazi newspaper where she works. She helps other Jewish women cloak their identities. And she takes lovers at will, setting her sights on Lilly from the first time they meet. "Jaguar," the alias by which she signs her letters, perfectly captures the woman: always on the hunt, yet trapped in a world where she is the prey.</p>
<p>Though she seems the proper Aryan hausfrau, right down to the bust of Hitler in her living room, Lilly (who writes as Aimée) holds secrets of her own. Yet the script, and Juliane Köhler's often tremulous performance, don't successfully integrate the contradictory strands of her personality. Lilly has had plenty of affairs with men and manages to keep her family together amid the bombardment, but a hungry glance or two from Felice and she melts into nervous giggles. It's unconvincing. Still, the couple's first time in bed, with Lilly trembling uncontrollably, is as powerful a sex scene as the movies have lately produced. And the swoony film seems true to Lilly's florid writings, though it indulges too many voice-overs from the women's letters to one another.</p>
<p>At the same time, <i>Aimée &amp; Jaguar</i> wants to signal to viewers that they're watching memory at work. It relies on the easiest of devices, a flashback structure, but the effect is unsteady and confusing. The film opens in present-day Berlin as the aged but regal Lilly is moving from her apartment into a nursing home, where she meets a figure out of the past--her former housekeeper Ilse, the woman who, we learn, first introduced her to Felice. Their bitter banter unearths a romantic rivalry; all these years later, both women still hold a torch for the effervescent Felice. As the film moves back to wartime, it's Ilse, not Lilly, who narrates the central romance. Dramatically, this is a very odd choice, since for the most part the film shares Lilly's logicbe-damned romanticism. Färberböck and co-screenwriter Rosa Munro may include this critical observer as a reminder not to take at face value what we hear and see. But the effect is distracting, not enriching. Pivotal historical and political developments are presented sketchily, or fade into the background completely. Key moments in the story, like Lilly's futile attempt to see Felice in Theresienstadt, are hurriedly described by a third party and never pictured.</p>
<p>At the end, when the film returns to the present, the two old survivors are chiding each other over who lived a more sexually adventurous life. It's a bittersweet yet truthful note--a refusal to turn women buffeted by history into heroines or martyrs. Their memories of a most horrific time are individual, partial, even petty.</p>
<p><font color="darkred" size="+2">S</font>tooped under the weight of age and overcoats, a group of old people shuffle off a tour bus at the gates of Auschwitz. Members of a younger, spryer entourage rush past, a video cameraman leading the way. "Every year,'' a survivor remarks, " another film."</p>
<p></p><p>It's an understatement, to say the least. Fictional stories set at the time of the Holocaust continue to arrive at a steady pace. Official outlets, like the Shoah Foundation and an archive at Yale University, are recording survivors' testimonies for the historical record. Increasingly, though, the survivors and their families are seizing the camera. Documentaries that follow aging Jews as they return to Europe, tour the camps and cemeteries, or try to find living family members have become almost a genre of their own.</p>
<p><i>Voyages</i> understands and explores this impulse, yet concludes that cinema will be no better at putting together the pieces than painting, poetry, or memoir. Documentary and testimony certainly have their purposes, but also their limits. In a brilliant stroke, Finkiel at one point unveils clips from an imagined documentary that follows survivors back to the camps. Shot, of course, on video, the film-within-a-film is gritty, immediate, and full of anger. On site and in front of the camera, the survivors enact the grief and fury that one expects. But <i>Voyages</i>, the fiction film, is about complicated emotions--aloneness, and aloneness inside togetherness--that the documentary camera can't capture quite so easily. Its sensuous details--the rain-streaked windows of a bus, a tight hug at the end of a barren hallway--convey beauty, joy, and sadness with extraordinary delicacy.</p>
<p>The three old women lovingly depicted in <i>Voyages</i> share a sense of displacement and a fading language, Yiddish. In a deep way, their stories are connected, but they're not intertwined. Each is "living with ghosts," as one character puts it, and despite their efforts to find answers and make human connections, to travel half the world or return to places of horror, those ghosts will not be put to rest. In the wake of the Holocaust, there are only "tracks" (the film's title as translated on-screen). They can be followed, but they don't always lead to a healing destination.</p>
<p><i>Voyages</i> opens with Rivka (Shulamit Adar), a 65-year-old Frenchwoman living in Israel, on a bus trip through Poland. Brimming with survivors from all over the world, the bus is full of chatter and kvetching, everyday arguments and complaints that testify to postwar life lived as normally as possible. But Rivka sits apart. Overwhelmed by sadness, she won't even talk to her husband, for whom the journey seems far less fraught. When the tour bus breaks down, she snaps, lashing out and questioning their bond.</p>
<p>Set in Paris, the second story follows Régine (Liliane Rovère), a widow of the same age locked into stultifying routine. Her lonely life seems to magically open up when an old gentleman steps inside and announces he's her father, believed to have died in the camps. Key details challenge this conclusion, but Regine wants to believe otherwise, for herself, her family, and for the old man.</p>
<p>The promised land of Israel is the setting for Finkiel's third story, about Vera (Esther Gorintin), an 85-year-old Russian woman with no family of her own. On a whim, she emigrates to Tel Aviv with her neighbors but quickly has to fend for herself in a bustling and brusque new country. A reunion with a long-lost cousin ends in disappointment, and it seems that Vera will be swallowed up in the hubbub. Then, as if by fate, she crosses paths with the woman we recognize is Rivka, the thread of whose life we pick up once again. </p>
<p>It feels like we've come full circle, and to some degree we have. People find each other. Or there's hope that they may. Yet Finkiel carefully demonstrates that the circle doesn't neatly close. It's been distorted, misshapen. The women (and men) of this generation will always be exiles. Their children and grandchildren, who ache to understand, who gamely follow them back to concentration camps, who make movies as empathetic as <i>Voyages</i>, can only travel so far. In the matter of the Holocaust, memory is a passport that cannot be duplicated. ¤</p>
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<hr size="1" /></center></div></div></div>Fri, 09 Nov 2001 20:50:50 +0000141763 at http://prospect.orgScott HellerBoogie Nicehttp://prospect.org/article/boogie-nice
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<font color="darkred" size="+2">F</font>or up-and-coming Hollywood directors, it's a regular stop on the pay-your-respects express: a visit with Billy Wilder, the man generally considered to be the greatest living American film maker, the sardonic impresario who gave the world <i>Some Like It Hot</i>, <i>Sunset Boulevard</i>, and <i>The Apartment</i>. Cameron Crowe made the pilgrimage in 1995. He was there to touch Wilder's hem, of course, and to ask the scrappy 89-year-old, who hadn't directed a film in 14 years, to take a small part in the movie Crowe was about to shoot.</p>
<p>Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding, Jr., were committed to the cast. The film was <i>Jerry Maguire</i>. And in no uncertain terms, Wilder said no.</p>
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Later, after the movie had opened to critical wows and a big box office, and was speeding to multiple Oscar nominations, Crowe published an account of this bittersweet meeting in <i>Rolling Stone</i>. The choice was no accident since <i>Rolling Stone</i> is where Crowe made his name. In 1973, when he was only 16 years old, Crowe joined the magazine's staff, soon moving up to become an editor. He nimbly leapt into film at 22, adapting his own book into the screenplay that became <i>Fast Times at Ridgemont High</i>. He went on to write and direct his next two films, <i>Say Anything</i> and <i>Singles</i>. A redemption story about a cynical sports agent, <i>Jerry Maguire</i>, his first movie for and about grown-ups, placed him in select company as one of the few contemporary writer-directors whose work was both sophisticated and popular.</p>
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Crowe walked away wounded from his brush with Billy Wilder. But a friend of Wilder's called after the <i>Rolling Stone</i> piece appeared, asking Crowe whether he'd be interested in seeing the veteran director again. This time, they'd meet for formal interviews, which would be collected in book form, like <i>Hitchcock </i>by François Truffaut. As it turned out, Wilder had liked <i>Jerry Maguire</i>, discovering in Crowe a fellow traveler--a gifted writer of comedy who was fair even to his most narrow-minded creations. But Crowe wasn't sure they spoke the same language. "I did not want to push the issue," he wrote later. "Heroes usually belong at arm's length--on a bookshelf, in a record collection. At a heroic distance. I did not wish to continue the flogging."</p>
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Thankfully, Crowe was willing to take his licks, for the resulting book, <i>Conversations with Wilder</i>, is outstanding. Crowe knows his way around a movie set, certainly, but he's also a superb interviewer--generous, perceptive, almost inhumanly thorough. (Who knew <i>Rolling Stone</i> trained 'em so well?) I can't think of a topic he doesn't cover, a key sequence he doesn't deconstruct, an obscure failure he doesn't get Wilder to defend or kiss off. While learning about the veteran's storied career, you also get a full-bodied sense of the acolyte at his knee--arriving promptly (or else), flattering and cajoling, sipping one martini after another to get the spicier anecdote, the more telling tale. Every time Crowe finished a session, he was afraid the interview would be his last. The notoriously irascible Wilder put the eager young pup through his paces; Crowe came through with flying colors.</p>
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<font color="darkred" size="+2">E</font>very now and then in <i>Conversations</i>, Crowe shares with Wilder a detail about the screenplay he's writing at the time, which he describes as his most personal work. And it is: <i>Almost Famous</i> recounts the first time Cameron Crowe got close enough to touch a hero. As a teenage journalist in the early '70s, Crowe followed Led Zeppelin and other rock bands on tour and wrote up his reports for <i>Rolling Stone.</i> The endearing new film, which continues the director's winning streak, thinly fictionalizes his own most famous odyssey. Here, moonfaced William Miller (Patrick Fugit), 15 and pretending, joins a band called Stillwater (think the Eagles) on a raucous crosscountry bus tour. Leaving behind a stern but sensible mother (Frances McDormand) who seems to know the phone number of every motel in America, William meets the strutting band members, the grungy tour managers, and the girl gang of band-aids--don't dare call them groupies--who flit from boy to boy. William becomes infatuated with the dreamiest of the lot, Penny Lane (Kate Hudson). But Penny has a thing for Stillwater's self-satisfied lead guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), who is slowly drawing away from his bandmates as he realizes his own star power.</p>
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<i>Almost Famous</i> delivers a handful of succulent set pieces that will quickly become as well-remembered as Cuba Gooding's "show me the money" spectacle in <i>Jerry Maguire</i>. The kid's first backstage visit, thanks to a well-placed word about the band's "incendiary" playing, is priceless. They may call him the "enemy," but once William is inside, he's really inside. So begins an extended minuet to get interviews with the band members, especially the taciturn Russell. Bouncing from city to city, William learns to narrow his oh-so-wide eyes, to see behind the hype and the trumped-up talk about rock's ability to save the world.</p>
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The young writer has been warned. McDormand, who virtually steals the movie with her tart telephone harangues, has banned pop music at home (not to mention Christmas and flour) because it's become too commercialized. And William's other guardian angel, the gonzo rock critic Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), cautions against the inevitable seductions that come with access. Rock and roll is becoming an "industry of cool," Bangs tells the kid. The good times, when rock represented a real challenge to authority, are over. The marketers and merchandisers have already won. All that's left to chronicle is the "death rattle" of a cultural explosion.</p>
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Indie directors younger than Crowe and without his mainstream ambitions have become fascinated by the '70s, producing some of the '90s' most adventurous cinema. But they approach the era with a semiotician's critical distance, and use the decade's embrace of pleasure and artifice as a crowbar to expose the emptiness of succeeding years. In the brilliant <i>Boogie Nights</i>, Paul Thomas Anderson writes his version of <i>Almost Famous</i>: Innocent boy finds wisdom and extended family, until a once-humane business goes corporate, shattering his bliss. Of course, the porn industry is where Anderson's innocent plies his trade, and he's hardly an observer with a tiny ballpoint pen. Todd Haynes's unfairly maligned <i>Velvet Goldmine</i> leaves aside Crowe's world--a world of rangy guitar dudes with their easy American grace--and details the short but vital moment of gender-bending flamboyance known as glam rock. </p>
<p>For every sweetly nostalgic moment in <i>Almost Famous</i>, and they're plentiful, <i>Velvet Goldmine</i> delivers a cold-eyed account of decadence sliding into decline. At heart Crowe wants to capture both moods, and who can blame him? We all cling to the popular culture that shaped us. We all want to freeze our icons in time, so as to keep ourselves young, too, singing along to their albums or acting foolishly at their concerts. Crowe captures that giddy vibe, the physical sensation of caressing a big new LP and believing there's truth inside. A softie at heart, he can't convey the loss of innocence that follows, the emotional equivalent of a digital CD, all faceless chill. Nor does he really own up to <i>Rolling Stone</i>'s own decline.</p>
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Still, the director is enough of a music wonk to know that glam's heroes--Bowie, Bolan, and the like--have had far more influence on music and style than conventional rock bands like Three Dog Night or the Eagles. During one hotel stop, the Stillwater tour crosses paths with Bowie, and his glittery groupies eye the fresh-faced band-aids with disdain, and vice versa. Get ready, the film says; something else is coming, and it's a lot more challenging than "Fever Dog," a Stillwater "hit" played in the film. It's one of only a few, in fact; Crowe seems to recognize that straight-ahead rock of the early '70s doesn't hold up very well. He dots the soundtrack instead with early Elton John and Cat Stevens, a mirror of the wistful tone for which <i>Almost Famous</i> settles.</p>
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<font color="darkred" size="+2">D</font>avid Bowie is <i>The Man Who Sold the World</i>, the title of his 1970 album, but the sad truth is that Cameron Crowe is The Man Who Arrived Too Late. <i>Rolling Stone</i> and magazines like it had not yet sold their souls to the crushing weight of the mass market. A kid with a dream had a chance. But the music that kid could write about, especially in the early '70s, when Crowe came aboard, was pretty mediocre. </p>
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Just as Crowe missed the moment as a rock journalist, so has he missed the glory days for writer-directors in Hollywood, as his chats with Billy Wilder make so clear. Could a mainstream film maker today sell a studio on a hero as snaky as Jack Lemmon in <i>The Apartment</i>? Tom Cruise's Jerry Maguire was as close as we've come lately, and as well-turned as the character was, he still got gooey at the edges. When Hollywood pokes at sensation-mongering journalists, it's the pointless <i>Mad City</i>, not Wilder's scathing <i>Ace in the Hole</i>. As charming as <i>Almost Famous</i> is--wonderfully acted from top to bottom, beautifully costumed and designed--it could be a little more hard-headed about times gone by. Sex and drugs are largely relegated to the background. Despite the bickering and betrayals and eventual compromises, the Stillwater tour makes for a pretty good party. </p>
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In spending more than a year interviewing Billy Wilder, Crowe wrote a book for the ages. But as a director, he's not Wilder. He's more sentimental; he's less tough-minded; he's American all the way. He can make you cry and laugh and fall in love with the lovers on screen, and that's no mean feat in a movie today. But in quizzing Wilder for guidance on how to make a personal film that doesn't go soft, Crowe didn't get the answers he needed. </p>
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The book's most poignant moments occur when Crowe tries to steer the conversation to his terrain. In little bursts, he tries to convey his own passion for rock and roll, the passion fondly detailed in <i>Almost Famous</i>. Wilder comes up blank. </p>
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"What is rock music?" the old man asks in the middle of one conversation.</p>
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Crowe proceeds to lay out a brief history, beginning with the blues, moving to Elvis, the British Invasion, English hard rock, American pop, and punk. With a great flourish, he's even able to tie in Eric Clapton's "Layla," which is playing in the next room.</p>
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Wilder listens carefully, weighing the details. "I can live without it," he concludes, and shrugs. ¤</p>
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<hr size="1" /></center></div></div></div>Thu, 08 Nov 2001 00:03:56 +0000141822 at http://prospect.orgScott HellerLet's Make a Differencehttp://prospect.org/article/lets-make-difference
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><font color="darkred" size="+2">P</font>ay It Forward is the kind of film I approach with dread. Hollywood strikes many discordant notes, but self-satisfied celebrations of communal uplift land with an especially abrasive clang. Frame a public injustice as a mystery and let a flawed crusader clean things up--an Erin Brockovich, a Lowell Bergman, or even that violin teacher Meryl Streep played in <i>Music of the Heart</i>-- and I can walk away satisfied. It's the big canvas, the panoramic vision, the strained, hopeful statements about All of Us that Hollywood inevitably mucks up.&#13;</p>
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In the ads, the coming attraction, and the prefabricated Oscar buzz, <i>Pay It Forward</i> promised to press exactly those buttons. The film's premise could be lifted wholesale from an <i>Oprah</i> segment or the playbook of either George Bush. What if--oh, such dangerous words--an individual selflessly helped another? Instead of repaying the good deed, what if the person who was helped went on to do something wonderful for three other people? And each of them went on to help three more folks? Quicker than you can say advanced-placement math, we'd have something revolutionary on our hands. Right?&#13;</p>
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A subliminal message often lurks behind such exhortations to individually driven social improvement. Who needs a government safety net, the whisper goes, when regular, real, average people can make a big difference? At worst, I imagined <i>Forrest Gump</i>--conservative agitprop drenched in faux innocence. At best, well, I imagined <i>Forrest Gump</i>, too: a modern-day fable that got by on charm and (for the most part) steered clear of mawkishness. With a top-notch production team and a cast featuring Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt, and Haley Joel Osment, <i>Pay It Forward</i> looked to be as slick and seductively well made as <i>Gump,</i> Robert Zemeckis's 1994 Best Picture triumph. Osment was remarkable as the haunted boy in <i>The Sixth Sense,</i> and Hunt (playing his mother here) has lately cornered the market on harried single moms. With his dryly biting line deliveries, Spacey surely would cut through the schmaltz, if schmaltz was what director Mimi Leder and screenwriter Leslie Dixon insisted on peddling. &#13;</p>
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I've watched <i>Pay It Forward</i> now, and I cannot tell a lie: The film isn't as overblown as I expected. (Or feared.) (Or hoped.) In fact, it can barely muster the energy to be expansive at all. There's an emotionally enervated quality to the film, a surprising unwillingness to embrace the utopian sentimentality that obviously got the movie made in the first place. I chalk up some of this to the film makers' restraint, and bravo for that. But I detect a bleaker tendency at work, too. Maybe in another day and time--even back in 1994, when <i>Forrest Gump</i> came out--American audiences could believe in their own ability to remake the world, hand to hand or neighborhood by neighborhood. Not so anymore. In an anomic culture of Internet "communities," special-interest politics, and bowling alone, e-mail jokes, not good deeds, are what we forward today.&#13;</p>
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The idea comes from the pen of Catherine Ryan Hyde, a novelist whose manuscript was scooped up and placed on the movie fast track even before it was published. In the novel, a social studies teacher named Reuben St. Clair sets the plot in motion, suggesting to his class of 11-year-olds that they'll get extra credit if they make a small gesture to improve the world around them. The precocious Trevor McKinney won't just put up posters or embark on a recycling project, like the few other kids who don't laugh off the whole assignment. He decides to take in and feed a homeless man, urging the man to do a good turn for someone else. His other chief task is to engineer a romance between his lonely mother and his equally lonely teacher. At first it seems that both efforts fail. The stranger appears to fall back into squalor and the romance sputters. What Trevor doesn't realize is that his brainchild has caught on in significant, soul-stirring ways. The reader learns from the second sentence about a "movement that changed the world," but earnest little Trevor, for most of the narrative, thinks his good intentions have been for nothing.&#13;</p>
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While its setting is shifted from California to Las Vegas, the film follows the book's tricky narrative structure, skipping between the boy's baby steps and the widespread impact he doesn't yet realize he's had. The quest of a cynical reporter (Jay Mohr) to get to the bottom of the story knits the strands together. Mohr is saddled with the film's hokiest lines. Every few scenes, afraid of being caught in the upbeat glow, he summons back his dour journalistic composure. He calls the chain of altruists "Mother Teresa's conga line" and wisecracks, "What are you, in some kind of cult?'' But his cynicism is overshadowed by his professional ambition: to be first to explain the origins of the grass-roots social movement that's sweeping the nation.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br /><font color="darkred" size="+2">O</font>r not. "Sweeping" is too sweeping a word to describe what's happening--in the film version of <i>Pay It Forward,</i> at least. The book is very different. Both depict only a handful of good deeds and, in doing so, sketch in a wider world of social ills and their healers. Both begin with Trevor helping a homeless man. Yet by the novel's climax, Trevor's plan is recognized by President Clinton himself at a White House ceremony, and "paying it forward" is a coast-to-coast sensation. Thanks to an 11-year-old, a nation has come to realize its destiny as the land of a million do-gooders (and still counting). The film indulges in far less wish fulfillment. Here the movement has spread beyond Las Vegas, all the way to ... California, with scattered news reports that it's happening in other states as well. No sign of politicians, only an interview on tabloid TV. &#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
Other detours from the novel also narrow <i>Pay It Forward</i>--oddly, for a movie that aims to choke up, and inspire, a mainstream movieplex crowd. (Hyde's Web site has links to her Pay It Forward Foundation, where you can read about school and community projects prompted by the book.) The biggest change is to the character of Reuben. In the novel, he's a black Vietnam veteran badly scarred in the war; in the film, he's Kevin Spacey. Renamed Eugene Simonet, the character is a burn victim who, we learn, was set on fire as a boy while trying to protect his mother from his abusive father. (This whopper of a dramatic revelation, which helps to cement the Spacey-Hunt romance, may be the actor's falsest screen moment to date.) The shift eliminates racial healing from the buffet of do-it-yourself social improvements. And it underscores how significantly <i>Pay It Forward</i> has been redrawn in the move from page to screen. The film's circle of charity is drawn tight around the small world of the family--the dysfunctional family, to be specific. Trevor helps his alcoholic mother find a good boyfriend to replace his lousy father. His mother makes peace with her own homeless mother (Angie Dickinson). She helps a petty crook, the black male that the teacher now isn't. He steps aside so a young white girl can get emergency medical attention (a smidgen of racial healing, after all). Her father hands the keys to his Jaguar to a stranded reporter, the Mohr character, who traces the chain back to its origin, making Trevor a little--but not too--famous.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
Have you gotten misty yet? If not, <i>Pay It Forward</i> makes one more bid for your heartstrings, raising Trevor to the stature of a martyred innocent, senselessly slain before he even recognizes his legacy. Here, too, the film and the book diverge. In the novel, Trevor is killed in Washington, D.C., just after he's feted by the president. He's stabbed, believe it or not, when he tries to break up a gay-bashing. As absurdly as this reads, it does signal an inclusive vision. The film comes to a more mundane, and therefore depressing, conclusion: Trevor is killed protecting a friend from the schoolyard bullies who sneak a knife through the metal detectors that guard the entrance to their school.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
This Las Vegas is a godforsaken, grubby place, sitting in the shadow of the glitz nearby. There's hardly even grass in the schoolyard. Big bucks may be pouring through the casinos, but you get the sense that it never does trickle down to the townspeople and their kids. That's the kind of larger political reality <i>Pay It Forward</i> won't squarely confront. Once, the camera pans through the teachers' lunchroom, where staff members grumble about school programs being cut. But in a film obsessed with the idea that charity begins--and ends--at home, you can hardly hear them at all. ¤</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 07 Nov 2001 23:14:07 +0000141857 at http://prospect.orgScott HellerPlaces of Peacehttp://prospect.org/article/places-peace
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><i><font color="darkred" size="+2">G</font>eorge Washington</i> opens on a close-up of a boy's sneakered feet carefully maneuvering along a rusted beam. Dusted in sunlight, it's a quintessential image of American boyhood, evoking freedom as well as risk. He may be a kid killing time, testing his balance on a fence. Or a wanderer on a train track, both eyes focused on a destination far away from home. <i>George Washington</i> doesn't give us time to decide. The boy skips off the end of the beam, and before we can see what happens, director David Gordon Green cuts away. Did the boy land safely? Or did he tumble to the ground? Did he hop right up again, sturdy and hopeful, sure in his body and his heart that he can't really be hurt? Or did he learn a small, harsh lesson, the first of many?&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
&#13;</p>
<p>By the time Green's remarkable debut film is over, we've been swept along by a stream of haunting, dreamlike images: a boy in an alligator mask reciting Bible passages in a desecrated school gymnasium; a spindly redhead in a neck brace, floating face down in a swimming pool; a black boy dressed as a superhero, his homemade white cape flapping in the wind while he directs traffic. Only 25, the director arrives like a bolt from the blue, creating one of the year's richest and most mystifying moviegoing experiences. Made with a multiracial cast of amateur actors, most of them children, <i>George Washington</i> unfolds with the lazy rhythms of a nearly mythical southern childhood. Not an ounce of aggression or a hint of cheap cynicism is on display. Green's 11- and 12-year-olds philosophize about sin and redemption, but they never curse. They roughhouse and they hurt one another, but they don't talk trash. They putter around dilapidated factories and empty playgrounds, looking to make meaning out of their own aimlessness. But theirs is a world devoid of video games, hip-hop culture, or designer label T-shirts.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
Like a young Terence Malick, who created physically ravishing otherworlds in <i>Days of Heaven</i> and <i>The Thin Red Line</i>, Green has fashioned his own universe out of the raw materials of our own. Tim Orr's masterly wide-screen cinematography burnishes the hidden corners of small-town North Carolina, spinning gold from rust. Amid the junkyards and empty lots, Green locates a form of salvation. In the hopes of boys and girls who shouldn't have much hope at all, he finds a kind of American beauty.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
No American president appears as a character in <i>George Washington</i>. Instead, there's George Richardson (Donald Holden), a sullen boy usually seen wearing a football helmet to protect a soft spot in his skull. Like most of the kids in the film, George is on the hazardous cusp between childhood and adulthood. He's gentle with stray animals, including the mangy dog his embittered uncle would love to banish from their house. He isn't much of a communicator, but there's a solidity to the boy that attracts Nasia (Candace Evanofski), a girl poised and elegant beyond her years. As the film opens, she decides to commit herself to George instead of his scrawny pal Buddy (Curtis Cotton III). Laconic to the core, neither boy seems especially affected by Nasia's shift in affections. But the move gets the three of them talking and implicates their friends Vernon (Damien Jewan Lee) and Sonya (Rachael Handy), too. In wonderfully naturalistic exchanges that Green scripted from the actors' own experiences, the characters trade poignant stories about their mothers and fathers, seen and unseen, as well as their hopes for the future. "The grown-ups in my town, they were never kids like me and my friends," Nasia observes in voice-over, as Green's camera roams over the fields and rails that map their landscape. "They had worked in wars and built machines. It was hard for them to find their peace." Living on their own time, the kids "try to find clues to all of the mysteries and mistakes that God had made."&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
&#13;</p>
<p>This sweetly spiritual, questing tone rubs up against the grittier truths of the ordinary adult world. At times Green plays the contrast for laughs, as when a gang of railroad workers argues about the nutritional value of what's inside their lunch pails. Yet the hint of something darker is never far away, especially in the character of George's uncle, Damascus (Eddie Rouse), whose hand seems always to be tightly clutching an ax.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
Even in a rural setting, a film that focuses on young, black, hemmed-in characters arrives with associations to the ghetto and its perils. Viewers' expectations actually help to give <i>George Washington</i>'s meandering story shape, though Green ends up confounding the predictable scenarios. Tragedy strikes, but not where or when it's expected. You know the film's tone has changed when you revisit one of the well-behaved main characters and he's smoking a cigarette. The aftermath of a violent accident casts a potentially terrifying shadow over these young lives, but they emerge in the light. Baptism is a repeated motif in <i>George Washington</i>; key scenes happen around a swimming pool, puddles are both welcomed and feared, and George himself chooses to be doused even though it could cause swelling in his skull. At the film's conclusion, George is born again--not as a Christian exactly, but as a secular Christ: a superhero in wrestling togs, a cape, and a fur hat. He helps old ladies safely cross the street, and he tests fire alarms and safety procedures to make sure escape is possible. He even has the power to predict the future.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
More specifically, he's an American hero, a good and gifted man in a long line of good and gifted men that goes back to George Washington himself. How bold a gesture in these cynical times for Green to grant this George his dearest wish: the chance to march in a Fourth of July parade and to meet one of his own heroes, Uncle Sam. George pays his respects in a barbershop, as Uncle Sam is getting a haircut.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br /><font color="darkred" size="+2">J</font>ames Gillespie, the poker-faced boy at the center of Lynne Ramsay's grimly poetic <i>Ratcatcher</i>, struggles for transcendence, too, but his desire is largely unexpressed, his possibilities far more limited. Set during a Glasgow garbage collector's strike in the 1970s, <i>Ratcatcher </i>finds tiny moments of grace in an otherwise hopeless environment. James (William Eadie) and his friends goof around, nearly oblivious to the mountains of greasy, black garbage bags that sit in the middle of their apartment complex. The nearby canal, sewage-filled yet fascinating, proves treacherous when, in the film's opening scenes, a friend of James's drowns there after the two boys' play turns aggressive. Guilt sits hard on the survivor's tiny shoulders, yet James confesses to no one. His friendship with Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), a needy older girl, provides just so much solace. Only accidentally, during a bus ride out of town, does James find his place of peace: a half-built suburban development that opens onto a field that seems to go on forever. There he can ramble at will. But home, his damaged family, his troubled friends, and his secret are never far away.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
&#13;</p>
<p>Ramsay's imagery is unforgettable. A boy twists himself inside the gauzy lace curtains hanging from the window of his dreary flat. With a shard of glass, a small hand carves marks into a shiny pair of new shoes. A pink-eyed mouse flies away from the Glasgow squalor, tethered to a birthday balloon. James's suburban journey is a tour de force; set to the plaintive strains of Nick Drake's "Cello Song," a beautiful new world unfolds to the boy from his seat at the top of a double-decker bus. Without a word being spoken, the film fleetingly blesses the child, offering him colors and textures he can't see or feel at home. Pages of script could never speak so eloquently. Pure cinema doesn't get any better.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
Like <i>George Washington</i>, <i>Ratcatcher</i> is obsessed with ruins, with water, with redemption. Yet especially in contrast to Green's hopefulness, Ramsay's vision feels bleak and punishing. So too, in surprising ways, does the Hollywood tear-jerker <i>Pay It Forward</i>, a film miles away in budget and pretension, yet similarly concerned with a boy's effort to make the world right. Both <i>Pay It Forward</i> and <i>George Washington</i> conclude with child heroes being interviewed on television. But whereas <i>Pay It Forward </i>wants to ratchet up the bitter irony (Haley Joel Osment's character has been senselessly killed on the very day the interview airs), <i>George Washington </i>opts for a gentler reckoning. In a film where the mass media seem so noticeably absent, the brief appearance of a television crew is especially disturbing late in the story. First pinned in a corner, George is later asked to share with the unseen broadcast viewer his definition of heroism. "A hero," he announces, "should be wise, strong, and very talented. They should also have a list of dangerous and poisonous things. I'm a hero because I like to save people's lives, stuff like that."&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br /><font color="darkred" size="+2">S</font>ometimes I smile and laugh when I think about all the great things that you're gonna do," Nasia tells George in the montage that concludes and sums up what's wonderful about <i>George Washington</i>. "I hope you live forever." Then we get another glimpse of a boy and a rusted beam, echoing the first, this time in a long shot. It's George, in his red-white-and-blue hero's ensemble, wandering by the railroad tracks. He takes a little skip and lands safely. Then he hops up, onto a higher beam, and continues on his way to save the world. ¤</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 07 Nov 2001 22:41:19 +0000141467 at http://prospect.orgScott HellerUp in the Airhttp://prospect.org/article/air-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>&#13;<br /><font size="+2" color="darkred">F</font>lying cross-country after a photo-op with the border patrol, newly appointed U.S. drug czar Robert Wakefield tries to rouse his troops. Thrusting out a dimpled chin as only Michael Douglas can, Wakefield dares them to be creative. "I want everyone thinking out of the box for the next few minutes," he barks in the most telling scene in Steven Soderbergh's <i><a href="http://www.trafficthemovie.com">Traffic</a>.</i> "The dam is open for new ideas."&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
Soderbergh's camera coldly eyes the lavishly appointed cabin. One after another, the lawyers, military officials, and policy wonks on the drug chief's staff throw back only blank stares. Even 30,000 feet above a narrowed political landscape, they have nothing new to say about the perennial problem of drugs.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
Ambitious and panoramic, yet as gripping as a crime thriller, <i>Traffic</i> could have been the mass-market film to trigger a bold discussion about the failures of U.S. drug policy. The impulse to muckrake seems to have fueled the project. Coming off the successes of <i><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0120780">Out of Sight</a></i> and <i><a href="http://www.erinbrockovich.com">Erin Brockovich</a>,</i> Soderbergh had the clout to make an issues-oriented drama in a Hollywood culture deathly afraid of issues. Screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, whose detailed script is loosely based on a 1980s British television miniseries, has a sharp eye for bureaucratic bungling and shady dealings. A Pulitzer Prize-winning <i><a href="http://www.nyt.com">New York Times</a></i> reporter lent his expertise. There's plenty of intrigue and excitement in the film's two-and-a-half-hour running time, which flies by. &#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
But in the end, <i>Traffic </i>shows us no more than what we already knew: The war on drugs is a futile mess. The screenplay announces that cartels outspend the law enforcement officials trying to stop them. Four in 10 kids try recreational drugs by high school, yet treatment isn't even an option on the policy makers' table. To its credit, <i>Traffic</i> tries to make its case dramatically, not just by the numbers. Snazzily shot and edited but lacking in intellectual toughness, the film seems far more adventurous than it is. Instead of riling us up, pointing fingers, or saying the unsayable about decriminalization or even legalization, <i>Traffic</i> merely reduces complex dilemmas to repetitive stock stories.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
Three intersecting tales make up the narrative. As Wakefield, a conservative Ohio judge brought in to shake up Washington, Douglas slowly learns the political ropes, soaking up conflicting advice at Georgetown cocktail parties. Back in the all-American safety of midwestern suburbia, the judge's angelic daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen), a prep school standout who shouldn't have a care in the world, slides from casual pot smoking to freebasing cocaine, and worse.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
Meanwhile, in San Diego, the immaculately groomed world of pregnant society wife Helena Ayala (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is turned inside out when her husband Carlos (Steven Bauer) is arrested for dealing. Helena knows nothing about the true nature of Carlos's business. A pair of determined federal agents (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzmán) have gotten the goods on Carlos by busting his flunky, Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer). The agents need to keep Ruiz alive long enough to testify against Carlos, whose dirty hands are wiped clean by the opportunistic lawyer Arnie Metzger (Dennis Quaid). If Carlos himself can be turned, then the truly powerful Mexican cartel dealers may be next.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
At the center of the third story is Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro), a good Tijuana cop working both sides of the border. In the film's gripping opening scenes, Javier and his partner Manolo Sanchez (Jacob Vargas) score a hefty drug bust in the desolate Mexican desert, only to find the loot whisked away by an army general, Arturo Salazar (Tomas Milian), who directs drug interdiction efforts on the Mexican side. Like Douglas's misguided judge and Zeta-Jones's oblivious wife, Del Toro's cop learns the hard way how hard it is to tell the good guys from the bad in this murky battle. The Mexicans routinely resort to torture to get information on smuggling operations. And Salazar is revealed to be working on behalf of one drug cartel as he comes down hard on its rival.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
Soderbergh orchestrates the drama with documentary precision, even shooting improvised scenes with the real border patrol. But the film's showy stylistics can be distracting. Returning to tricks he unveiled in the 1995 neo-noir <i><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0114788">The Underneath</a>,</i> the director uses filters to cast the Mexican scenes in an acrid yellow, the D.C. and Ohio moments in a clinical blue chill.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
Even more disconcerting are the performances of the big-name stars. Most of the film's enormous cast is superb, especially Del Toro (acting largely in Spanish), Ferrer, and Clifton Collins, Jr., who is riveting in the small part of a flamboyant hit man. But Douglas, in sharp contrast to the shaggy likability he showed in <i><a href="http://www.wonderboysmovie.com">Wonder Boys</a>,</i> is a high-tension wire here. When his character discovers how little he knows about his daughter, we're meant to sympathize with a parent torn between work and home. But the script calls on Douglas to turn street vigilante, plowing into the lower depths to find the once-virginal Caroline now selling her body for the next high. The actor's clenched performance--as familiar as the plotline--is off-putting. Zeta-Jones wins no sympathy, either. After Helena's first quivering worries about her fate, she flicks on the steely resolve and determines to eliminate whatever obstacles she must to remain comfortable. It's all too sudden and too close to the actress's own raw ambition, so amply detailed in <i> <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com">Vanity Fair</a></i> and a hundred other magazine cover stories, to move or even shock us.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
The film scrupulously wants to demonstrate that buying, selling, and using are not just the province of the amoral, the poor, or the black and brown. Indeed, the script's most trenchant moments cut to the heart of the drug culture: the common wish to escape the everyday, a wish that gets commodified into a multibillion-dollar industry. Every time a character downs a scotch on the rocks--and it's often--the sound seems amplified to emphasize the clink of ice against glass. It's the sound of self-medication; no better, the film says, but more legal than the bubbling of a bong hit. In one charged exchange, the judge's wife (Amy Irving) accuses him of outright hypocrisy when he tries to distinguish between her youthful forays with drugs and their daughter's downward spiral. "Can we take away the quotes around 'experimented' and call it what it was?" she implores.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
In dialogue like this, <i>Traffic</i> plays psychologist to an America bedeviled by its own mixed feelings. Zero-tolerance policies may put small-time users behind bars, but they have little bearing on the powerful promise of transcendence that drugs continue to provide. Visually, the film brings the point home when Caroline, still wearing her private-school uniform, freebases for the first time. The film pauses for a moment after she sucks down the smoke, letting us see her eyes nearly roll back in her head and a single joyful, overwhelmed tear run down her cheek. Even after she graphically suffers the worst, the schoolgirl still can't fully repudiate the desire that led to such a terrible fall.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
Mexico's torment--either falling in line with American law enforcement or cashing in on the drug bounty--is embodied in the character of Javier Rodriguez. Thanks to Del Toro's anguished performance, this strand in <i>Traffic</i> also captures the tone of moral confusion the film meant to achieve. Yet wrapping up its thriller plotlines, <i>Traffic</i> often careens into foolishness. To confront us truly with the bleak absurdity of our situation, the film needed a pinch of Oliver Stone, or at least the anti-establishment irreverence of <i><a href="http://www.three-kings.com">Three Kings</a>,</i> David O. Russell's (mostly) shrewd 1999 Gulf War drama. Instead, <i>Traffic</i> leaves us like Justice Wakefield's staff, up in the air, staring and waiting for answers.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
Speed--not the drug but the motion--is the high of choice for Chuck Noland, the efficiency expert played by Tom Hanks in <i><a href="http://www.castawaymovie.com">Cast Away</a>.</i> A modern man in perpetual overdrive, Chuck has the perfect job: He's a corporate honcho at Federal Express, bringing the gospel of getting it there fast to the hinterlands. <i>Cast Away</i> opens brilliantly, with Chuck in Moscow, delivering a Vince Lombardi-style speech--"Time rules over us without mercy"--to Russian workers still getting the hang of the American way. The easy warmth Hanks brings to every role renders Chuck tolerable; we like the guy, but we can also understand why, back in Memphis, his longtime girlfriend, Kelly (Helen Hunt), won't commit to marrying a man who wears a pager to bed.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
Called away on business one Christmas Eve, Chuck hurriedly exchanges gifts with Kelly on the airport tarmac, as a waiting FedEx jet rumbles in the background. Nowhere does Chuck feel more at home than in the sky. "I'll be back in a minute," he assures her with a jaunty wave. One minute he's absentmindedly playing with his bandaged thumb inside the cabin; the next, the plane is battered by a storm of biblical proportions and plummets into the South Seas.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
Miraculously, Chuck washes up on the shore of a deserted tropical island, his woolly winter sweater still clinging to his battered body. And then--even more miraculously for a Hollywood film--stillness and silence. For the next hour, with no music and barely any dialogue, <i>Cast Away </i>watches as the chastened businessman learns all over how to survive. From the stray FedEx boxes that wash up on shore, he finds his tools. Ice-skate blades make an ax; a skirt makes a net for fishing. For companionship, he paints a face on a volleyball stained with his own blood, names it Wilson (after the manufacturer), and talks out loud to the totem.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
Director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter William Broyles, Jr., trust us as viewers to slow down and watch and reflect, to marvel at Chuck's ingenuity and to wonder how we would handle the same circumstances. <i>Cast Away</i> has been celebrated for its risky shooting schedule, which allowed Hanks a year to look suitably stranded by losing weight and growing out his hair and beard. Yet when a screen cue tells us that four years have passed and Hanks appears, lithe in a loincloth, like Charlton Heston in <i><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0063442">Planet of the Apes</a></i>, the human scale turns superhuman and hokey. Chuck dares to challenge nature once again, cobbling together a seaworthy raft out of logs and the shell of a portable toilet that thumps onto shore. Composer Alan Silvestri's schlocky music cues every reaction.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
&#13;<br />
The character's dazed reentry into society, when it inevitably comes, is handled with bittersweet restraint. Yet by then, the movie had lost me--a real shame, considering the rare and rich spell it had woven for an hour and a half. Well after Chuck does, <i>Cast Away</i> comes crashing down to earth. It never takes flight again. ¤</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 07 Nov 2001 21:40:52 +0000141960 at http://prospect.orgScott HellerThe Anti-Auteurhttp://prospect.org/article/anti-auteur
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><font size="+2" color="darkred">R</font>emember the name: <a href="http://www.boxoff.com/issues/jun00/winterbottom.html">Michael Winterbottom</a>. Not yet 40 and already the director of eight features, Winterbottom is the remarkably versatile, remarkably gifted Englishman one great film away from a place among today's moviemaking elite. His latest and most ambitious effort, <i><a href="http://www.theclaimmovie.com">The Claim</a>,</i> won't be that launching pad. A romantic epic set just after the California gold rush, it's too subdued, too snowy (literally and figuratively) to reach a big audience. But like almost everything else the director has touched, whether scaled small or grand, set in the Old West or today's London, it's beautifully acted and physically sumptuous, marked by moments of rare visual power. Only a few other directors--Martin Scorsese, certainly, but also <a href="http://www.chinesecinemas.org/shanghai.html">Zhang Yimou</a> (<i>Raise the Red Lantern; To Live</i>) and <a href="http://www.filmunlimited.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,6737,338784,00.html">Claire Denis</a> (<i>I Can't Sleep; Beau Travail</i>)--so deeply understand that an exalted cinema depends on the intense interplay of music and image as well as word. Even when his films don't fully come together, their individual elements haunt, like Alwin Kuchler's bleached cinematography, so delicate and yet chilling, in <i>The Claim</i>. Winterbottom is no flashy, MTV-schooled showboat. He's a master director from the old school, an unfashionably fast and hard worker who puts together a team of ideal collaborators and lets them show their stuff.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
His first feature, <i><a href="http://www.firstrunfeatures.com/vid/butterflykiss.html">Butterfly Kiss</a> </i>(1994), was an instant attention-getter. The bare-bones description--a lesbian serial killer and her lover take to the road--wasn't promising, and some critics foolishly dismissed it as a low-rent <i>Thelma and Louise</i>. In fact, the film is a searing study in neediness and redemption, made unforgettable by the furious performances of Amanda Plummer (as the sociopath Eunice) and Saskia Reeves (as Miriam, her lonely companion). Set in a northern British nowhere of anonymous highways and tacky rest stops--an emotional prison in the open air--<i>Butterfly Kiss</i> showcased the director's ability to turn even the emptiest of atmospheres into a vivid force, almost a character of its own. It also marked his first big-screen collaboration with the equally eclectic screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
In 1995 Winterbottom directed two dramas: <i>Go Now,</i> about a man struck by multiple sclerosis, and <i>Jude,</i> a solemn adaptation of Thomas Hardy's <i>Jude the Obscure,</i> starring Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet. Already it was clear that Winterbottom was drawn to material about society's outsiders, and could create sympathy even for difficult characters, like Plummer's Eunice or Rachel Griffiths's Arabella, in <i>Jude.</i> Yet unlike the directors he admires, Truffaut and Bergman, Winterbottom doesn't have a signature style or even recurring themes. He's the anti-auteur; he's good at many things.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br /><i>Welcome to Sarajevo </i>(1996), the director's biggest international success so far, showed a polemical streak unseen in his work before or since. Mixing big American stars like Woody Harrelson with Europe's best, including Stephen Dillane and Goran Visnjic, the film is as raw and anguished as the documentary footage, shot on location, that Winterbottom laces throughout the narrative. Boyce loosely based his script on the true-life story of a journalist on a personal crusade to smuggle to safety one child from the remnants of the former Yugoslavia. This storyline gives the film a strong spine, while the jagged, restless camerawork reflects the struggle to make sense out of a senseless situation. Working in the heat of the moment, Winterbottom and company loosened up in <i>Welcome to Sarajevo </i>and created one of the few films made in English that successfully captures the madness of the Balkans.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
In 1997 Winterbottom served up his only true misfire, <i>I Want You,</i> a mannered study of romantic obsession. He planned next to work again with Boyce, this time on another Hardy adaptation, which they would set in the American West. But "there's no point in just sitting around and doing nothing while you're waiting to raise the money," Winterbottom told one interviewer. "So I just got on with making some of the other interesting scripts that were offered to me." He shot not one, but two: the Belfast-set <i>With or Without You, </i>which wasn't released in the United States, and the moving ensemble drama <i>Wonderland, </i>which was, and remains one of the best films of 2000. Over the course of four days, three working-class sisters struggle to find connection and to stay afloat in the moneyed new order of Tony Blair's Cool Britannia. Screenwriter Laurence Coriat memorably etches a cast of wry and wounded Londoners, but it's Winterbottom's inspired direction that makes magic in <i>Wonderland</i>. Grainily shot with a handheld camera, yet set to Michael Nyman's lushly aching score, the film builds to what can only be called a state of grace.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br /><i>The Claim,</i> Winterbottom and Boyce's rewrite of Hardy's novel <i>The Mayor of Casterbridge,</i> has much to praise as well. The film conjures the Old West in its rough-hewn adolescence. The discovery of gold has led a town called Kingdom Come to rise from the snows of the Sierra Nevada. Yet the mountain town and the expansionist nation itself are built on a dark and guilty foundation. The West of <i>The Claim</i> is boisterous, lusty, and a little messy, full of flawed characters struggling to make up for their mistakes. But the romantic drama at the film's heart is sometimes pale when it should be full-blooded. Still, there's more here to look at, listen to, and think about than in most other films with twice the budget. Of course there is. It's by Michael Winterbottom. Remember the name. ¤&#13;<br />
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</div></div></div>Wed, 07 Nov 2001 21:26:53 +0000141976 at http://prospect.orgScott HellerGlad to be Unhappyhttp://prospect.org/article/glad-be-unhappy
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br /><font color="darkred"><big>R</big></font>ock critics a few years back coined the clever term <i>miserablism</i> to describe a brand of guitar music light in metallic crunch but heavy with emotional self-flagellation. It wasn't a compliment, exactly. Yet with songs like "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," bands such as the Smiths and their flamboyant lead singer Morrissey proclaimed their angst so grandiosely it became, for fans, sublimely comic.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
If cinema has a poet of romantic miserablism, it's the virtuosic Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, who has made seven feature films--each unforgettable. The Smiths drew their inspiration from British camp icons like Oscar Wilde; Wong follows a French path, Baudelaire by way of early Jean-Luc Godard. But instead of trenchant Godardian critique, Wong indulges his characters' youthful follies, their meandering and alienation, their futile efforts to find meaning in the ephemeral present while simultaneously waxing nostalgic for the past. Wong's is a world of missteps and missed connections. Should-be lovers turn the wrong way at the wrong time. Anomic city-dwellers moon over impersonal objects--a plaid shirt, a toy airplane--as a substitute for the real thing. In a typical Wong Kar-wai moment, a lonely cop nurses a beer at a city bar, turns to the jukebox for solace, and stares away a whole afternoon--frozen in place, waiting to select the perfect soundtrack to his solitude, while the rest of the world rushes by in rapid motion. (This from <i>Chungking Express,</i> the director's 1994 breakthrough film and still his hyperactive, hyper-romantic best.) &#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
Drenched in voice-over, buoyed by incongruous pop music (the Mamas and the Papas, Nat King Cole) the films are like small romantic conspiracies; we listen in on the characters' dreamy reveries, but they don't know what we know. Because we've come in so close, we too can share the fun: a melancholy so rich that it turns into pleasure. &#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
Expectations of good behavior constrain the proper couple in Wong's new film, <i>In the Mood for Love.</i> They're married to other people. And they're neighbors in cramped, raucous quarters. It's Hong Kong, 1962, and a chilly society is thawing, but slowly. Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a hardworking journalist, moves into an apartment on the same day that Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk), a secretary, takes a room one door over. Mrs. Chan's husband is often away on business; Mr. Chow's wife works odd hours as a hotel receptionist. Wong allows us to glimpse the spouses only in fragments--a slender forearm here, a straight back there. He grants us more time with the protagonists at their workplaces--him, photogenically cradling a cigarette in a smoky newsroom; her, buying gifts for her boss's mistress. They are together in spirit but apart in fact. Framing the actors in tight, vertical compositions, in doorways and halls, the director creates a sense of entrapment. Claustrophobia, you come to feel, is just intimacy by another name.&#13;</p>
<p> &#13;<br />
When the pair discover that their unseen spouses are in fact having an affair, you expect them to give in to a simmering passion. But <i>In the Mood for Love</i> is suffused with the exquisite rush of self-denial. Wong is a fantastically inventive filmmaker. His films <i>Chungking Express, Fallen Angels </i>(1995), and <i>Happy Together</i> (1997) are giddy with obtuse camera angles, jittery jump cuts, blurry swish pans, and harsh lighting tricks, but here he works in small, subdued strokes. When he shows off, just a little, the effect is all the more breathtaking. Slow-motion scenes of Cheung brushing against Leung as she rushes down the apartment stairwell, trying not to look his way, glow like electric sparks frozen in midair.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;<br />
The actors, who've each worked for the director several times before, are, as always, matchlessly gorgeous. The sober and soulful Leung won the best actor award at last year's Cannes Film Festival for this performance. In her tight-fitting, high-necked silk dresses, Cheung is at once decorous and dead sexy. And that voice: husky, knowing, ready. But holding back.&#13;</p>
<p>&#13;</p>
<p><i>In the Mood for Love</i> is not the director at his best. In his other films, goofy, left-of-center humor, baroque plotlines, or noirish gangster touches leaven the brew. The filmmaker tends to work without a script, and his features can run out of steam or careen weirdly. Here, the passage of time, so deliciously slow as the lovers feint and parry, suddenly moves ahead by years. And their tightly controlled physical world opens up to take Leung on a journey to Angkor Wat. Still, for 97 minutes, <i>In the Mood for Love</i> made me miserable--and uncannily aware of how good that can feel. &#13;
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</div></div></div>Wed, 07 Nov 2001 21:09:15 +0000141998 at http://prospect.orgScott Heller